credo

So far, in 35 minutes the Worldwide “Developers” Conference seems to be exclusively about consumer features, though they did mention API as an afterthought :)

It is interesting to see that Netflix hasn't implemented SharePlay.

The keynote lists many other partners (such as Hulu, HBOMax etc.)

It is interesting to contrast the U.S system of genetically modified food (e.g. the "new" genetically modified cottonseed) with how traditional systems dealt with food (such as cottonseed).

Cottonseed is considered as a nutritious source of food in Madurai, India (and perhaps in other parts of the world). They don't genetically modify cotton, but they process cottonseed to create cottonseed "milk", a healthy, nutritious drink

ddg couldn't find many online references to cottonseed milk (Paruthi Paal in Tamil). However, here are a couple of links

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlD9gxef5mo Starting from around minute 18:00 onwards, this video shows a vendor talking about how he makes cottonseed milk. Unfortunately, the video doesn't have English subtitles, but it might be interesting anyway :)

2. http://www.themomandthecity.com/paruthi-paal/

In all these years, GitHub didn't make a single penny as profit

Like most "successful" startup companies over the past decade, only way (for investors) to make money was to make the company a "product" that would be sold to the highest bidder

Why is anyone surprised that GitHub would be sold ?

My older iPad (yes, first gen iPad from 2010) is eight years old and it works great (from my perspective :)

Yes, I can't download most new apps, but last year, I released an update for 'Economy for iPad' (#1 Finance app for several weeks in 2010) and that app continues to support the original iPad and iOS 5.1

Generally, the best way to keep old devices running well is to keep the old OS. (Old major version at its latest minor version e.g. 10.3). There is a slight risk of not being able to pick up security fixes that didn't make it into 10.3, but made it to 11.0. However, as a developer, who tests apps on older OS versions, I keep old test devices with old OS versions on them.

Btw I should also add that Netflix runs perfectly on my old iPad with iOS 5.1 :)

It was a bit disingenuous for Trump to describe India and China as top polluters

India (population 1.3 Billion) creates lesser CO2 emissions than the US

China's per-capita emissions is just around half of that of the US

[Edit: replying to comment about pollution and emissions

The Paris agreement is about climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

When Trump talks about polluters and withdrawing from the Paris agreement, it seems illogical to suggest that he wasn't referring to CO2 emissions]

I have no pre-existing health problems (that I know of) and I get no government subsidies. The scorecard lists people like me as winners in the GOP health care bill.

However, I think, most of us will lose from this bill, because we'll live in a country that is less fair

* less fair (if you believe that a market-based approach to healthcare is unfair to people who are born with - or acquire - serious health problems, aka pre-existing conditions ...... and if you believe that poor people should get subsidies to let them get affordable healthcare)

It is sad to see some HNers flag this report.

This was submitted 46 minutes ago and it is ranked #45 with 5 votes.

Meanwhile, at #39 is "Japanese researche firms part of global effort to develop spray-on solar panels" with just 3 votes (and submitted more than two hours ago). Btw I'm referencing #39 for ranking comparison purposes, I have nothing against that item.

India does have a high level of criminality and corruption in politics, but it is different from the U.S. in one aspect.

An Indian politician who brags about sexual assault and doesn't even deny video-taped evidence of the bragging .... would have no chance of being elected as Prime Minister. As we demonstrated in November, American voters have a much higher tolerance level when it comes to electing our president.

Like the op, I do both iOS and Android development work. However, as an indie, my platform preference is primarily market-driven. So most of my work has been on iOS

Unlike the OP, I like and use Android AsyncTasks. I have no problems with Android fragments either.

However, I did have a lot of other concerns with Android - primarily the low quality of Google's SDK for Android. Here is what I wrote about it https://blog.cascadesoft.net/2013/12/31/the-bigger-problem-w...

Interesting flagging behavior :)

The #3 item on the front page has (Longest humans can live) had 44 points and was posted more than 1 hour ago. The #4 item (Typora) has 42 points and was posted more than 1 hour ago.

However, this post on the App Store is at #8 even though it has 172 points and was submitted 47 minutes ago.

These tweets are great marketing for his new company Storyworth and I mean that seriously :)

No one (well, almost no one) would have known who this guy was and that a company called Storyworth existed, but now a lot more people will know about it and how the founder is older and wiser now compared to when he was at Google :)

It is great to know that WatchOS3 will have better performance, and background processing for fitness apps will also help, but aside from that, I don't see any other big Watch OS news for developers.

The qz report suggests that users were more happy and less worried/sad if they stayed off Facebook, but it doesn't mention the (imo) more important part of the study.

The study says that most people "post their good sides on Facebook"

The study also says that many facebook users "envy" the amazing, happy and success related notes posted by their friends on facebook.

So it seems like you can stay happy on facebook and not feel worried if you

(a) understand that you should not envy your friends

or/and

(b) understand that you shouldn't take all facebook posts as face value and understand that you shouldn't assume that these posts represent your friends lives in entirety. You shouldn't assume that life is a bed of roses for your friends just because they posted the best parts of their life. It is likely that they have just as many problems and troubles as you do even thought their facebook posts may not capture all of these problems.

This is a (somewhat) misleading headline and report.

The report refers to a study which says that sitting is no worse than standing without moving the body.

However, the report does nothing to contradict past studies which show that sitting is bad for the body (in comparison with standing up and walking every n minutes).

A better way of reading the study would be to say that "sitting" and "standing without moving" are equally bad. A lot of other research suggests that sitting for hours is definitely worse than taking a break every hour (or n minutes) and walking for a couple of minutes in that break.

The arrogance of this CEO (demonstrated by the paragraph below) is mind-boggling. Whether I trust the NSA or not is irrelevant to the question of whether I want private companies tracking my children.

That said, this sort of tracking is happening in my son's school as well and I'm trying to figure out how I should respond to this. Many schools (here in the Seattle area) ask kids to do their homework online. My son (in elementary school, public school) does math homework on the IXL website. They track all of his online time, the specific timeframe he worked on his homework, time spent on questions etc. This information is also made available to his teacher. I plan to discuss related privacy issues with his teacher

>Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira finds such concerns overblown. When parents protest that they don’t want their children data-mined, Ferreira wishes he could ask them why: Is it simply that they don’t want a for-profit company to map their kids’ minds? If not, why not? “They’d rather the NSA have it?” he asked. “What, you trust the government?”

The first piece of advice "don’t claim you’re changing the world until you’ve changed it" makes sense.

A tiny minority of founders really work on products that change the world. Many just hope that their company is acquired and that is how most "successful" startups "exit". The so-called "exit" is a badge of honor (even if the company had been through a fire-sale or acqui-hire)

There are other good points in the column, but I think Sam is a bit too defensive when he says "ignore the haters and work on whatever you find interesting. The internet commenters and journalists that say you’re working on something that doesn’t matter are probably not building anything at all themselves."

If someone is a "hater", does it really matter if they are building anything else ?

Tesla has its critics, social-networking-for-cats will also have its critics. Both companies may assert that they are changing the world. However, I don't think it makes sense for the latter to use the former as an example of why its critics are all "haters". Of course, I don't mean to suggest that the latter deserves its critics. I'm just saying that there is no need to circle the wagons against these so-called "haters".

If you think your startup is worth it, just work on it. Most startups don't change the world in a big way, but that shouldn't stop you from trying.

I think the Volkswagen episode shows that we need better emission testing mechanisms.

Demanding that all code be open-source unfairly targets the software industry (companies that sell software products for money). Why not ask Google to make their search engine code public ? If all software code must be publicly available, why not demand that Coca Cola also make their formula and their entire manufacturing process public ? Why not insist that no product must have any proprietary/secret information about how the product was created ?

Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. I think we need a better emission testing system for testing emissions, not a government review of software code.

IMO asking for free software code is an ideological demand that is better promoted through the free market. Free software ideologues should refuse to buy products that have proprietary components, but all of us should only ask that the government fix its emission testing process.

>The other awesome thing about Norwegian taxes is that the government does it for you.

The US has also attempted to do this. However, every attempt has been killed by corporate interests (like Intuit) and politicians (mostly Republicans) and special-interest-groups (conservative anti-tax organizations)

The latter claim that the government shouldn't automatically create a form with all taxes done because the government will not try to minimize citizen tax payments (and most people will check the 'OK' button without reviewing their taxes to see if they can get additional deductions). In reality, I think that most anti-tax organizations realize that they'll lose a significant portion of their support if filing taxes becomes easy. In the case of companies like Intuit, the motives are obviously transparent.

I agree with all four points mentioned by the writer, IMO of those four reasons, the biggest problem is the absence of "paid upgrades"

Not being able to charge for updates is a problem that affects almost every single paid app (assuming the app is supported across multiple versions and major updates) in all the app stores. This is an unsustainable proposition for most developers.

At a recent Seattle Xcoders meeting in Redmond, our speaker spoke about how he had given up his indie business and had now switched to contracting (disclosure: I run this meeting and had asked the speaker to speak).

At the meeting, I noted that Apple made its profits through hardware and they could therefore afford to make their software free. Similarly, Google is an ads company and so they don't need to charge for their software. However, the dominance of these companies means that most users/consumers expect all their software to be free (and the small minority that downloads paid apps wants upgrades to be free).

It is going to be an uphill battle for any "software" company to survive in the future. IMO that applies primarily to indie devs (I'm one myself) who sell apps in the app stores, but the problem also extends to large companies like Microsoft.

We are in the mobile space, but my company is not a potential customer for Mixpanel or Amazon Analytics. I haven't looked at the offerings of either company. (we developed our own simple analytics)

However, I read all three responses to your comment. One comment points to your high(er) price, one more says your price is unaffordable, the other one says the giants will "will douse the flames of your party." Imo this is a problem - not just for your company, but for every startup/small-company out there.

Amazon and Google can both afford to lose money on their analytics engine. In the old days, people may have described it as predatory pricing. However, that doesn't matter because the legal definition of "predatory pricing" is somewhat limited and consumers/customers mostly care about short-term matters like the price of the product today. Of course, MixPanel itself is a venture-funded company that can absorb some losses (so you're in a better position that what a bootstrapped company would be in). However, this just points to the challenges that small companies face in the market. Of course, I root for the little guy (and I myself started a company that has never sought funding and hasn't gone through the consulting/services path either). I also want giant companies to have a smaller market-share, so I wish you the best.

>"My parents divorced. No one is talking to my dad. We're not anywhere close to being healed yet and I don't know how long it will take to put the pieces back together."

We don't know the circumstances under which the father and his then-girlfriend had given up their son for adoption. However, that seems to have happened decades ago.

I'm not sure why no one is now talking to the dad for something that happened decades ago.

In addition to the heart benefits listed in the report, I've read reports which conclude that a low-carb diet is also very beneficial for regulating blood sugar levels (and reducing diabetes risk).

However, I think it might have been interesting to read more about the risks of a low-carb diet. For instance, some studies have shown that low-carb diets can reduce testosterone levels in men and I've also read that it could hurt short-term cognitive skills.

It is also unclear if the study involved (mostly) refined carbohydrates or complex carbohydrates. Obviously, the effect of complex carbohydrates is very different.

There are a number of studies regarding low-carb diets but most of them tend to focus on a subset of the results that one might see from a low-carb diet. So a smart strategy would be to read many of these reports and then decide what makes sense (though it isn't going to be easy for a layperson to read a wide range of different reports and draw the best conclusion on what is good for them)

The title is eye-catching and the writer has a good writing style, but I see a lot of problems with the headline as well as the content

- Microsoft's private offices were an innovation in the 80s/90s, cramming large numbers of worker bees into a single large office is a retrogressive step, not a 21st century innovation

- The writers focus is on Visual Studio, but a number of other teams had switched to agile much earlier. I worked in Windows Live Mobile in when we switched to "agile" in 2004. This wasn't being dragged into anything, it was a relatively early adoption

- Software projects do often get delayed, but not always. I was one of the dev-leads who worked on Office XP in the 90s and though we had a long ~3year, ship cycle, we did ship on the original planned shipped date (RTM 3/2/1) Steven Sinofsky deserved a lot of credit for that.

Amazon has mastered the art of saying nothing with a lot of self-serving words :)

Their post is titled "Update re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption". However, they don't state what their specific demands are and why the business was (in their words) interrupted.

Amazon's proclaimed objectives aren't as important as knowing what their specific demands (from Hachette) are. I'm not a book-author, but as a developer, I set the prices of the software products I develop (Apple and Google let me do that, Amazon doesn't). So my sympathies are with the book publishers, but even if they weren't, I'd still like Amazon to explicitly spell out their demands instead of using self-serving pricing elasticity theories to sway public opinion.

Marc Andreessen is being true to form when he attacks regulations, attacks Piketty and suggests that IPOs will flourish if we remove (what he describes as) "burdensome" regulations, "Regulation Fair Disclosure" etc.

However, he seems to be totally glossing over the fact that IPO regulations have already been weakened in recent years. This has resulted in less transparency and increased secrecy and that is exactly what people like Andreessen have been asking for.

It is questionable whether this increased secrecy actually benefits the economy or the average investor (of course, it is clear that the lack of transparency does benefit powerful interests in the country and that is why a bipartisan majority in our dysfunctional congress was able to miraculously come together and pass a bill to reduce regulations and cut down on IPO transparency). http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/the-twitter-i... touched on this topic in the context of Twitter's IPO.

This is a duplicate submission. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7455757 for the original submission (with 349 comments)

"Your job is not to Code"...."Your job is to solve problems" says the post

Now that it is #1 on the front page, I look forward to the sequel "Your job is not to solve problems, your job is to prevent problems from happening in the first place"

Anyway, on a more serious note, my job is to code, my job also includes numerous other things. None of these things are necessarily an end to themselves, but semantic games aside, it is my job to do all of these things.

Many iOS frameworks are named with a "Kit" suffix (UIKit, MapKit, StoreKit, EventKit etc.)

There is nothing odd in some new iOS frameworks following a similar convention.

If anything, I think Apple's new framework is going to generate a lot of marketing/PR value for the company. I think they realize this :)

Unfortunately, ultimately, the research, data and analysis isn't going to matter much.

Consider the debate on climate change, 98% of climate scientists agree that humans contribute significantly to climate change, but large numbers of Americans (including some of the most powerful politicians and talk-radio hosts) either deny climate change or claim that humans don't do much to cause climate change.

I expect the inequality debate to play out in a similar fashion. Many economists may agree with Piketty. However, the FT has thrown sufficient "doubt" on his findings (it doesn't matter that they compare past tax data with today's "survey" data etc).

This "doubt" provides sufficient ammunition for those who'd like to deny that inequality is on the increase. So the debate will end up as another one of those "he said, he said" topics in the media and people are likely to take sides based on which side of the ideological divide they are one.